The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  Nevertheless, he carried an ID with him, so that in case of accident, his family wouldn’t be left to worry and wonder what had become of him. He did such things now, it was second nature to him. It hadn’t been that long ago since he was responsible to no one but himself.

  North was the direction he chose, with the lake and the streaming traffic on his right. He’d stretched out at home, but the cold made it difficult for his muscles to loosen. All his old injuries (hamstring, knee, hip pointer) made themselves known, though mildly. He thought he could work through them if he didn’t push himself too hard. The air was cold, although not so cold that it hurt his lungs. After three-quarters of a mile he struck a good pace. His breathing eased and he took pleasure in his own motion. He’d always liked running at night, though it was another thing his wife had objected to, objections Ryan had dismissed as unrealistic and overcautious. She’d come into a mother’s worrying nature.

  He couldn’t have said what he was thinking—if he was thinking anything at all, or if his mind had been quieted into perfect blank calm—it was not the same as carelessness. In any case he hadn’t seen it coming, the false step, the toe catching on an uneven surface. It upended him hard, his left knee taking the full impact, the whole of his left side on the cement and his head skidding.

  It felt like sleep, like waking up from a restful sleep. There were feet around him, very close to his face, and voices a mile away. Man’s voice, woman’s voice. Back and forth. His knee hurt like hell. The pain brought him around, otherwise he would have been content to lie there listening to the mere sound of the voices without their taking on meaning. “Shit,” he said, or tried to say, tried to bend his knee up to where he could massage it.

  A man knelt next to him. “Hey buddy, how you doing?”

  “That’s a stupid,” Ryan said, meaning, stupid question. Something was wrong with his mouth as well.

  The woman said, “I think he needs an ambulance.” He saw her feet, her dressed-up shoes.

  “No.” He shook his head. It felt loose on his neck. He was determined that there be no ambulance, although he could not have said why.

  The man said, “He’s got a head injury, he ought to get it checked out.” The man sounded like a bossy type. Ryan decided he didn’t like him.

  He would have to proceed with cunning. He forced himself to sit up briskly, as if his head didn’t feel like it was full of sparkling confetti. “S’my knee that hurts.” He rolled his leg from side to side, demonstrating.

  The woman said coaxingly, “Let’s get a doctor to look at that knee, how about it?”

  Ryan thought about standing up. If he could stand, he could get out of their clutches. “Lil help here,” he said, attempting a jaunty tone.

  Instead they took a step away from him and conferred in low voices. Then they surrounded him again. He thought maybe there were more than two of them. The man, or a different man, said, “You live around here? Someplace around here?”

  “Yeah.” They were waiting for him to tell them where. He felt in his vest pocket and came up with the flat wallet that held his ID and house keys. This was taken from him and passed around.

  “Buddy?” It was the bossy man again. “The lady’s willing to give you a ride home. If you got somebody there to look after you.”

  “Ah, yeah.” He was expected to say more. “Wife.”

  Then he was hoisted to his feet. He found himself draped over the bossy man’s shoulder, unpleasantly close to his jowls and large unclean ear. A car—the woman’s—was pulled up to the curb, and after some discussion it was agreed that he should be placed in the backseat so he wouldn’t have to bend his leg. He felt something wet leaking from the vicinity of his knee, either blood or melted snow. The woman got behind the wheel and waited while the others arranged him lengthwise on the seat. “Thanks,” he said, waving. Then the door closed on him and the car started up. It was a Mercedes, luxurious, new smelling, with a leather interior the color of vanilla pudding. He hoped he wouldn’t bleed on it.

  “How you doing back there?” she asked. “Still with me?”

  She pulled away from the curb. He wanted to say something clever about where else would he be, then he realized it was a question about his mental state, much as you might ask someone if they knew the day of the week or the name of the current president. “Huh,” he said.

  “I was driving right behind you when you fell. Scary. You practically cartwheeled.”

  “I feel like an idiot,” Ryan said. His first complete, coherent sentence.

  “It could happen to anyone.” She turned around and smiled, then turned back again to attend to her driving.

  He hadn’t seen her face until then. He stared at the rearview mirror where now only her eyes were visible, passing in and out of strips of light and shadow.

  She said, “I’m just going to go up two blocks, then turn around and go down Archer.”

  “Fine.”

  “I could still take you to an ER, if you want.”

  “That’s OK.”

  Silence as she braked at intersections, turned back south again. He was afraid his damaged head would make him say something wrong or crazy, he was afraid he was mistaken about everything. He was afraid of not being mistaken. “Here,” he said, once they approached his block. “The one with the courtyard.”

  She eased the car up to the entrance. “Do you want me to help you out? Can you put any weight on that leg?”

  “Ah, I think I’ll be . . . if you could just . . .” He was having a hard time maneuvering himself to the edge of the seat. He didn’t think he could get the door open.

  She set the parking brake, got out, and walked around to the curb side. She opened the car door and peered inside. “Stuck?”

  Ryan planted his good leg and pivoted out to the street, holding on to the Mercedes’s roof. There was no way not to look at her. A lady doing a favor for a stranger, her smile pleasant and impersonal. Something about the way she was dressed—heels, good coat, perfume—suggested that she might be on her way home from a party. “Thanks again,” he said.

  “Let’s see if you can walk.”

  He took a hop, lurched, crumpled halfway over, straightened himself. Led with his good leg, then let his bad leg catch up. “Like a champ.”

  “I’m hoping you don’t have to climb any stairs,” she said. Which stopped short of an invitation to help him.

  “Elevator. Lucky.”

  “You should probably stay awake for a while, in case you have a concussion.”

  “No problem.”

  “I’ll watch and make sure you get inside,” she said, and walked back around to get behind the wheel of her car.

  It was now a point of pride for him to get himself to the front door, and he did so, panting, cursing, but keeping up his pace so that she wouldn’t feel obliged to come after him and embarrass him further. At the door he turned around and waved. She tapped the horn and pulled away.

  Maybe she hadn’t recognized him. But she’d had his ID. Or maybe she’d forgotten him, but he didn’t believe that. Or had she hoped that he would not remember or recognize her?

  Once inside the apartment he managed to peel off his pants, clean up the bruised and shredded skin of his knee, apply ice, take a Vicodin left over from his last injury, get back in bed beside his sleeping wife, and in spite of all the wisdom about concussions, and in spite of all his history of bad sleep, he was asleep almost at once.

  His knee swelled up and made walking near impossible. He spent the rest of the week at home, trying to work at the kitchen table, or navigating around the apartment using a mop as a crutch. His wife didn’t come out and say that it served him right for sneaking out and roaming the streets so imprudently, but it was clear this was what she thought. The weather turned cold again and the three of them stayed inside, an extended period of togetherness. His daughter was delighted to have him home and heaped him with toys and books and baby dolls, all the loot of the recent Christmas, gone slightly stale un
til they were revived by the wonder of his presence.

  “Daddy look! Daddy read!”

  He was sought after, importuned, courted. His complete and constant attention was necessary to her happiness. She had silky hair the color of honey that might in time turn into his blond, or his wife’s darker shade. Her eyes were blue, their lashes damp and spiky, her skin a perfect layer of bloom. He had never imagined loving anything as entirely, as violently, as he loved her. And she loved him and her mother because she had no choice except to do so.

  But she would grow beyond them and into the wider world, and at some point he would become more and more the background of her life.

  Ryan had to sleep with his leg elevated, and if he tried to roll or shift positions, it sometimes woke him up. But although neither his mind nor his body was at ease, he got through his nights without those numb hours of wakefulness. It was as if they had served their purpose. They gave form and shape to a restlessness he hadn’t known was in him.

  • • •

  He’d already tried finding Janine in the phone book, and as expected, there was no listing for her. He was certain, intuitively, that she lived here, she hadn’t been just visiting or passing through. She’d been cautious with him because she knew she could be found.

  Once he returned to work, he had the opportunity to better proceed. There was no question that he was going to try to find her, if only because she didn’t want to be found. Beyond that, he didn’t permit himself to go, because he knew very well that he was being willful and perverse, poking a stick at something that might rise up and do him harm.

  There was a Pasqua in Lake Forest—her father, Ryan was pretty sure. But he didn’t think he would get anywhere by calling and nosing around, claiming some vague old acquaintanceship. Her father wouldn’t have given someone like him the time of day. He wasn’t glib enough, or inventive enough, to come up with some better cover story. He believed she must live in the city, and perhaps not all that far from him, given her presence on that particular street at a late hour. He kept his eyes open as he went about his rounds of commuting and errands. No sign of her.

  Her car had looked new. She’d always driven new cars; it seemed that prosperity had not left her. He searched out Mercedes dealers in the northern suburbs, found three of them. It was another two weeks before he was able to make his way there (his wife and daughter dropped off with a friend, another mommy, for a play date and shared lamentations). He sauntered around the lot, admiring the high polish of the new, immaculate metal, until a salesman joined him. They shook hands, and Ryan asked about this model and that one, heard about their features, their value, their many virtues.

  And didn’t Dr. Pasqua’s daughter have one of these?

  At the first dealership he drew a blank, but at the second he was told that yes, Mrs. Burnham had this year’s model, she was pleased with it. Burnham. Now he had a name.

  Then he went no further. He carried his new knowledge as he might a gun in his pocket. He and his wife had a discussion, verging on argument, about money, and another one about sex. If they could get around to in-laws, they’d achieve the full trifecta of married conflicts. It might have reassured him or consoled him that their problems were the same as other people’s, and other people got by or muddled through them. But it made him impatient and melancholy.

  As part of an effort to create more time for each other, which they both agreed they needed, one night they got a babysitter and went out for dinner at an elegant Gold Coast Italian restaurant, the kind that served nothing in tomato sauce. It was still winter. They had to park a couple of blocks away and quick-walk through the trampled slush at the curbs. Their eyes watered from the wind. At the restaurant his wife unwrapped herself, took off her heavy coat and wool hat and muffler and gloves, revealing her pretty dress. They were shown to their table. They settled themselves and shook their heads and took a steadying breath. These days it seemed to take so much effort to do anything.

  They ordered drinks; the waiter brought bread and olive oil. His wife looked around the room. The restaurant was new to them. “What do you think?”

  “Nice.” He thought it looked like any other restaurant, with its recessed lights and expensive surfaces and gliding waiters. Nor did it smell of food. “You look great tonight.”

  “Thank you.” Her fingers touched her hair, her throat. Since their daughter’s birth, she’d worried about her weight. She went on grim campaigns of dieting and exercise, doing battle with her extra ten pounds, although Ryan told her truthfully, no one noticed or cared about them but her, she was a beautiful, sexy adult woman whom he still had the hots for. The fight about sex had made it necessary for him to say this from time to time.

  “You look good in red.” The dress had a low neckline. His eyes rested on the place between her breasts where there would be just enough space for his exploring fingers.

  She shrugged. “Trying to make up for the days when I never change out of sweatpants.”

  The waiter brought their drinks. They opened the menus and studied them. The different courses were presented in florid calligraphy, and there were words with which they were not familiar. “Carpaccio?” Ryan ventured.

  “We can ask the waiter.”

  “It’s not important.” He hated asking about things he thought he should already know.

  “You are so funny sometimes. That’s what the waiter’s here for, to answer questions. And why are you whispering? You always whisper in restaurants. Yes you do.”

  He guessed he did. A stupid, hick habit he hadn’t broken. A good restaurant still felt a little like church, or a library, a place requiring solemn good behavior.

  He didn’t much like having it pointed out to him. As if she was some born sophisticate! She’d grown up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Christ’s sake!

  Because he didn’t want to spoil the evening with ill humor, he said, “I will ask the waiter about the carpaccio. I will bellow at him.”

  They ordered and their food came, and it was all very good. Things such as veal, and gnocchi, and thin-shelled pastas filled with wild mushrooms. They agreed that this must be cuisine from some fortunate part of Italy where life was so good, no one ever emigrated. Unlike the poor Sicilians with their meatballs and pizza. “I’d like to go there sometime,” his wife said. “Italy.”

  “Really?” This was a mild surprise. “Why Italy?”

  “Because it’s so different from everywhere else. Everything I grew up with.”

  Ryan knew what she’d grown up with: the Dutch Reformed Church, as pious and grim as anything the Lutherans could offer, the expectation that she would settle down within twenty-five miles of her birthplace and raise up a family of equally pious, grim, judgmental, fault-finding progeny. Really, it was extraordinary that their two Old World ancestries had dispersed to the New and united themselves in marriage. They had laughed about it and resolved to leave behind them all the conventions and strictures of their upbringings.

  His wife said, “Not that I knew any Italians. Just what you’d see on television. Or like, The Godfather. They had big messy families, they sang opera, they had passionate fights, they drank a lot of wine . . .”

  “They stomped grapes with their feet. They danced the tarantella.”

  “Something like that.” His wife gazed around the well-mannered dining room, where no one was doing anything boisterous, shouting Salute, or planning hits.

  Ryan said, “Clearly, we have to get you to Italy. Let you bust loose.”

  She shook her head. “When is that supposed to happen?”

  “When Anna’s a little older. When it’s a little easier to travel with her, when she can appreciate it.”

  “What about Spud?” Spud was the name they had given to their planned, yet-to-be-conceived second offspring.

  “Spud can come too.”

  “That means, maybe we’ll get there in about fifteen years.”

  “Not if we make it a priority.”

  “A priority,�
� his wife said in the patient, instructive tone he had come to dislike, “is saving for college educations, or for a house, or an orthodontist, or something we really need.”

  “Maybe what we really need is a little bit of pleasure once in a while.”

  “Pleasure meaning ‘self-indulgence.’”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Ryan said, trying to deflect her mood. Once she began in this dreary, my-life-is-a-series-of-burdens vein, they often ended up in an argument. He thought she didn’t really regret her life up until now; she just wanted to complain about it.

  “If you have a child, the child comes first. The child gets her orange juice when she needs it, and her vaccinations when she needs them, and her vitamins—”

  “It’s not like we leave her out in the car while we go have a few beers. Jesus, Ellen.”

  “If you have a child,” she went on doggedly, “then you’ve made certain choices. You’ve said, ‘This is important enough for me to be unselfish. Because someone depends on me entirely for her very existence.’” His wife slumped back against her chair, looking both tragic and irritated.

  “I get that,” Ryan said. “Why would you think I didn’t?”

  The waiter appeared then, asking if they would like to look at the dessert menu. “By all means,” Ryan told him. “Is there anything particularly self-indulgent tonight?”

  She flicked her eyes over the menu and closed it. Ryan said, “A little gelato wouldn’t kill you.”

  “I’m already going to have to swim extra laps to work off this meal.” Swimming was his wife’s exercise two days a week. The Y had a kids’ program and his daughter was a Water Baby, working her way up to Tadpole.